


Everything a Season Under Heaven

by ScarletteStar1



Series: Sister Janet and Sister Grace. . . Stories of Convent Love [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Love, Older Woman/Younger Woman, Pining, hurt comfort, wlw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-26
Updated: 2020-11-26
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:02:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,130
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27725870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScarletteStar1/pseuds/ScarletteStar1
Summary: Ecclesiastes 3:1- "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven."
Series: Sister Janet and Sister Grace. . . Stories of Convent Love [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2122788
Comments: 10
Kudos: 13





	Everything a Season Under Heaven

**Author's Note:**

> for my babydoll. my heart is so thankful for you.

**I**.

_It’s spring._

Sister Grace sits in the kitchen garden. She has her prayer book in her lap, but really she watches Sister Janet transplant daffodils and paperwhites.

Sister Janet doesn’t wear gardening gloves. Sister Grace watches her long fingers sink into rich soil, unconcerned about becoming dirty. Her hands are tender with the flowers. She cups the little root balls, gently places and covers them in their earthen beds.

“They’re lovely,” Sister Grace says.

Sister Janet sits back on her heels, admires the bright yellow and white blossoms. “Aren’t they?” She turns to Sister Grace and smiles. Though her lips curve, it is more her eyes that engage in the act of lighting her face with pleasure. Janet squints in the sun, and Grace loves how it creates a network of delicate lines that swoop toward her temples. With a deep breath that makes her shoulders and eyebrows rise, Sister Janet dusts her hands on her apron and stands.

Sister Grace is suddenly bereft, knowing her mentor will leave for other chores, and they will be parted.

At the very last, Sister Janet bends once more to the flowers in their new home, as if she is will whisper them secrets. She plucks a tiny paperwhite blossom and drops it on top of Sister Graces’s hands as she returns to the convent kitchen.

Sister Grace lifts the flower and inhales the sticky, early aroma. She allows it to tickle her lower lip, then tucks it between the pages of her prayer book.

**II.**

_It’s summer._

The heat has been almost as torturous as the silence between them. Youth makes Sister Grace impatient, stubborn, and needy to be Cate. Maturity makes Sister Janet proud, frightened, and independent, reluctant to be Isobel. Nuns are schooled in the art of silence and now they brandish it like daggers between their teeth, only to spit them out in solitude and weep in isolation.

Days pass. Cate misses falling into Isobel’s eyes in the little moments between everything else.

Weeks go by. Isobel barely tolerates the loss of Cate’s tiny touches in secret spaces.

It seems as they forget why they stopped speaking, they also forget their way back to one another. The chasm deepens, widens. The temperature rises.

A tremendous storm breaks the heat wave in the middle of the night. Thunder shakes the foundation of the convent, and lightening arouses its occupants. For some time they wander the halls in electrified silence, then drift back to their beds. Cate cannot fall back to sleep. She creeps down the hall to Isobel’s cell and slips silently in. Without a word, she slides beneath the sheet that covers her body, and curls into her. They shiver into one another and find the way their arms fit best.

“My Darling Love,” Isobel sighs against Cate’s forehead.

“Yes,” Cate whispers as she nuzzles into Isobel’s breast. “I’m here.”

**III.**

_It’s autumn._

They’ve been out all night at a death bed and return toward the convent, bone weary, and somber. It’s only past dawn; the day’s traffic has barely begun. The streets are quiet. Without consultation, they instinctively walk to the river and stand at the bridge. They say a prayer and turn their faces to the crisp breeze coming off the water.

Cate puts her hands on the railing and leans over. The morning is gray, heavy with clouds. “It might rain,” she observes. Isobel murmurs assent and puts her hand on the rail as well, close enough so her littlest finger just touches Cate’s.

“Do you know,” Isobel begins and her voice is soft and slightly higher in pitch like it is sometimes when she’s about to cry. Cate puts her hand over Isobel’s on the railing and squeezes it.

“Yes. I know,” she says so Isobel doesn’t have to finish whatever was so hard to say.

They look around anxiously, but no one is there. They press their shoulders together and hunch closer, so no one would see them holding hands because it feels good and necessary and they just aren’t ready to let go. Not yet.

**IV.**

_It’s winter._

Religious sisters can’t exchange or keep holiday gifts. Cate grows sullen, not because she wants baubles or treats, but because she longs to give something to her friend.

It’s a hectic time. Advent’s holy schedule, demands Isobel spend more time as Sister Janet. It is harder, more painful for Cate to be Sister Grace. Her lips chafe from licking them in the icy, London weather, but she doesn’t know what to do with her tongue without Isobel to talk to.

Waiting for the Light of the World, she’s lost in darkest exile.

If only she didn’t recall with such vivid precision the exact manner Isobel curls her fingers by her face as she sleeps. If only she wasn’t filled with the subtle nutmeg aroma at the nape of her neck. She kneels in chapel with these things and prays to forget the language in which they alone speak. But there is no forgetting, only regressing into every moment they’ve shared, like they are pockets into other worlds.

Cate draws a tiny icon of Julian of Norwich holding a cat and slips it in her prayer book. She’s so certain Isobel has forgotten her, she nearly screams when the familiar knock arrives on her door close to midnight on Christmas Eve.

“Darling,” Isobel flows into the room, a ray of light.

“You’re here?”

She holds Cate’s face in her hands and kisses her. “Mmmh, I’ve brought you something.”

“Bel, no.”

“Hush,” she pulls a little tin from her pocket. “This is salve for your poor, chapped lips. I made it.” She opens the tin, dabs her ring finger into the mixture and slides a bit over Cate’s lips. She kisses her again. “Much better, I think?” Out of her other pocket, Isobel withdraws a thin strip of something. “I made this also,” she whispers. It’s an embroidered bookmark. Cate offers the drawing she made. Isobel smiles in the way Cate loves best, with her beautiful eyes and their tributaries of exquisite lines.

“Bel? If there were a place in the world for us, what would you want for Christmas? From me?”

“Only this,” Isobel says without a moment’s thought. She kisses each of Cate’s fingers. “Only you. Forever.”

“Yes. Me too,” Cate sighs.

**IV.**

_It’s spring again._

It’s a cloudy morning, but the air is warm and fresh.

The two women kneel in the flower bed. Their fingers brush together in the soil as they place tender, green shoots and waxy, fragrant blooms in their proper places. Just as they finish, cool raindrops begin falling. In tandem, they turn their faces to the heavens to feel the nourishment as it comes down, like a blessing.


End file.
